Augmenting Collaboration beyond Classrooms through Online Social Networks

The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable collaborators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between users. This paper describes an agent based social networking system called PeCo-Mediator-II for seeking for a collaborator with the chain of personal connections (PeCo) in distributed organizations. This system helps gathering, exploring, and visualizing social networks. This paper proposes a social-networks based matchmaker (SNBM) agent for bridging heterogeneous classrooms . The experimental results show that the system facilitates that learners encounter collaborators and develop a new helpful relationship beyond the classroom and that SNBM on behalf of a teacher played an important role of a mediator between heterogeneous groups.